Giving Voice to My Characters

In my stories, I often try to give voice to some people who live on the fringes of society and aren’t often featured in popular fiction.

Many writers put a great deal of imagination into creating characters, but I find I tend to use people I have known, and most of my characters are composites. I also draw on my background for most of my settings. I try to get into the protagonist’s head, put him or her in a setting with which I am familiar, and then sit back to see how the characters react to the situation in which they find themselves.

Because I have worked in a variety of settings, I am comfortable placing my characters as laborers or forklift drivers on the midnight shift in a steel fabrication plant, or operating a massive glass melter in a fiberglass manufacturing facility.

I have also worked supervising an inmate work crew in a large medium security prison and moved into teaching special education at inner city public schools and alternative schools, both public and private, and those settings show up, too.

The protagonist in my Jesse Damon crime novel series is not based on any one specific person. After twenty

years in prison on a murder conviction, he is released on parole, and finding it tough going just to survive. I draw on several of the young inmates who were assigned to my crew. Some prison counselors put a great

deal of thought into the institutional work positions they offer inmates, all of which pay in the neighborhood of a dollar a day. After I got a reputation for being a “mother” figure, I was often assigned people who had been convicted as adults for crimes committed when they were in their mid teens, and many of them told me their stories in great detail.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

Anthony was convicted of rape when he was fourteen. “I’d never do anything she didn’t want to do. She

was my girlfriend. But when she got pregnant, she told the preacher I’d forced her.”

“My sister was gonna tell my mom that I’d been drinking. I was so mad. I grabbed her by the neck and shook her. And then she was dead. Now I’m locked up. For life. My mom lost both her kids in one stupid minute.”

“I loved her,” Gilbert said. “I still do. But I was seventeen and she was only fifteen. Her father reported that I’d raped her, and she was afraid to go against him. As soon as she turned eighteen and moved out, she started writing me.” He showed me some of the letters, where she apologized to him for not having the courage to stand up to her father. But she didn’t offer to testify now, either.

“When I was a little kid, my dad would boost me through windows so I could pass stuff out the window to him. We did that for years. Then one time somebody was home when we didn’t expect it. I got caught. I never told them about my dad. They had my fingerprints from lots of burglaries. I waited and waited for my dad to come visit me in jail, or at least write me a note. I never heard from him again.”

                                                                                                  

Other people who cry out to me to be in fiction include my uncles, who came back from war traumatized. Despite some attempts of family to help them, they couldn’t hold down a job, became homeless and drifted into alcohol and drug dependency. And girls I knew who made poor choices in mates, marrying men who turned out to be abusive, to be told by their families, “You made your bed. Now lie in it.” People devastated by injury or illness, job loss or the dissolution of their family.

So many of these people do their best, just to try to maintain a reasonable life. And so many of them fail. I want to give their voices a chance to be heard.

How about your characters? Do you deliberately develop them, or do they spring from people who have been in your life?

Run For Your Life by Kait Carson

Anyone who has read one of my books knows my characters are into exercise. Both Catherine and Hayden are runners. Hayden scuba dives. Exercise, and those specific sports, is perhaps the one and only trait we share. Oh, I admit, I tried to make them more like me. Well, Catherine at least, she was the first series character I wrote. Hayden, let’s just say I knew better. Characters are organic. They grow and change at their own rate, and the person on the other end of the keyboard has very little to do with it. A lot like children, I’m told.

Both Hayden and Catherine use running as a means of clearing their heads, thinking things through, solving mysteries and crimes. They are active runners. They think and puzzle as they go. Me, not so much. Someone once asked me what I think about when I run. I had to think about the answer. In reality, until recently, I ran and emptied my mind. Kind of a physical meditation. Yet at the end of the run, I would find the answer to some thorny problem. The phenomena fascinated me. To become full, you must first be empty. Sounds like the Dalai Lama, who is a great man, but probably not a runner. I’ve used the technique to solve problems of plot, character, and closer to home, personal stuff. It never failed.

Every runner knows the hardest part of running is lacing up your sneakers. Once that is done, you are going. Until that is done, there are days when you dread the exercise. Since spring, I’ve noticed that my times have lagged. My usual three to five mile run was taking longer, and I was dreading it more. When my husband asked me what I wanted for my birthday, I quickly responded iPod® Shuffle. This little one-inch square will hold up to a gigabyte of tunes and it fits in the key pocket of my running shorts. Best of all, it is available in Hayden blue.

Husband, being the well-trained chap he is, immediately ordered one for me. On delivery day, I downloaded a running album (a combination of songs like Footloose done to a disco beat), the theme from Top Gun, and Wipeout (for those of you who remember Wipeout, tell me your toes aren’t tapping right now). My first run, my times were cut in half. Same for the second. It took me until the third run to figure this out. The songs were filling my head. I was becoming the songs, losing myself in the lyrics, moving in time to the beat, and free-associating from lyrics to stories. Completely different experience. What was filling my head was coming out in storylines. A snatch of a lyric would become a scene. But I was no longer getting answers to problems. My running time became fully creative.

I’ve been toying with the mix of music and silence for the past few weeks, and I’ve discovered how to best balance the exercise level I crave with the creative result I need. My big question now is do I introduce Catherine or Hayden to musical runs. What would the beat bring out in them? Time will tell. In the meantime, I’ll keep running for my life.

What about you? Do you crave silence in your workouts, or do you want the background filled. Does it make a difference to how you feel?